Monday 6 October 2008 08.03 EDT
First published on Monday 6 October 2008 08.03 EDT

"I have seen the game played before," the elderly steward muttered from the side of his mouth, "by American servicemen stationed here in the war. They all chewed gum while they spoke so we couldn't understand a word they said."

In front of us a diamond has been marked out on the turf, a pitcher's mound has been set down at mid-on, and netting has been strung up in front of the pavilion. Marcus Trescothick stands over the home plate swinging his Louisville Slugger and, from beneath the tugged-down peak of his cap, eyes the hit over right field to St James' graveyard.

Trescothick is the man responsible for the temporary transformation of Taunton County Ground into a ballpark. It is his benefit year, and, eschewing the more typical golf days and dinner evenings at the Rotary Club, he has decided to challenge the Great Britain baseball team to a game.

His squad, Banger's All Stars, is composed entirely of professional cricketers. Geraint Jones is leading off the batting, and Charl Willoughby and Ashley Giles are sharing the pitching duties. Those three and Trescothick have 166 Test caps between them. The rest of the Banger's line up has been drawn from the Somerset squad.

The Great Britain baseball team are a largely amateur bunch, part-timers with a point to prove. That said, they finished second at the 2007 European Championships, inspired to unprecedented success by their Minor League star Brant Ust.

It's a pub-table conversation brought to life. An animated hypothetical. Would Trescothick's hand-eye co-ordination make him a natural slugger? Could Giles' ability to spin a cricket ball translate into a mean curve? Might Jones make a sharp shortstop? And would the superior athleticism and ball skills of the professionals outweigh the knowledge and understanding of the amateurs?

The answer was an emphatic 'no'. This became sharply apparent when Giles took to the mound in the third inning and gave up 10 runs in 13 at-bats, a hammering easily equivalent to a bowler going for 36 in a single over. He was even on the receiving end of a grand-slam, Ian Young smashing a homer into the Old Pavilion with the bases loaded. It earned him some merciless ribbing from Jonny Gould, the Channel Five sports factotum doing sterling work on the tannoy.

Actually Giles was invariably ahead of the count, as the batters were bemused by the sheer slowness of his pitches. Surprisingly, the pitching was the part of the game the cricketers were best at. Willoughby, a gangling southpaw with an arm like a whip, did better. It wasn't the odd ball that he pitched in the dirt that unsettled the batters so much as the more frequent ones winged in at their heads. He managed two strike-outs for a single unearned run in his sole inning.

Unearned, for those as unfamiliar with the lingo as myself, means it came from a fielding error. I got to know this quickly because the single worst thing about the cricketers' game was their fielding. Bizarre this, as you'd expect they would instinctively excel. Some of their mistakes were the product of habit: Neil Edwards amusingly failed to grasp the rather crucial point that, when you take a catch in baseball, you don't stand there throwing the ball in the air and cheering while the offense are still sprinting towards home plate.

More baffling was the standard of their catching, which was worse than woeful. Alan Smith, the general manager of UK Baseball, pointed out that catching in a mitt requires the fielder to take the ball in the webbing between thumb and forefinger. The cricketer's instinct is to align the fingers with the ball, not the spaces between them. Pretty much every single run of the 21 Great Britain took off the Banger's involved a fielding error of one kind or another.

The sharpest point of comparison was the batting. A baseball swing is more natural than that of a cricket bat, but also far harder to execute well. The best batters hit .300. For a cricketer that equates to scoring a single run three times in every 10 innings. Good hitters fail seven times out of every 10 at-bats. And there isn't a single cricket ground in the world with a boundary as long as that at the average ball park, where a home run needs to travel around 450 feet.

The power needed to hit that far comes from pivoting the hips. It's more akin to a golf swing than a cricket shot, where opening the hips means you'll play across the ball. The more elegant Somerset batsmen found the transition the hardest. James Hildreth simply couldn't curb his desire to cover-drive, and Arul Suppiah played a string of lovely back-foot defensives with a vertical bat. Both players have plum cricket techniques, and so couldn't help but swing just with their arms rather then use their legs.

Trescothick, who has always had more rustic inclinations, clobbered his first two pitches out of the ground, but as both were over backward point they were outside the foul lines and didn't count. All the same he went "three for three", reaching first base every time he was at bat.

"The hardest thing," he told me as loitered by the bull pen, "is judging the pitch. There are so many different things these guys can do with the ball: they can swing it, dip it. It's tough to judge which one to hit." Embarrassingly, the cricketers mustered only one run, and that was thanks to Geraint Jones' speed across the turf, as he stole second base and then hotfooted it home when Hildreth sent a straight drive down the middle.

The Banger's standout player by far was the young Somerset keeper Craig Kieswetter, one of those irritatingly gifted men who can probably pop a drop-goal over from the halfway line and run 100 yards in under 11 seconds. No surprise then that he orchestrated a double-play and pitched three fiery innings.

The GB head coach, Stephan Rapaglia, singled Kieswetter out. "He really impressed," he said. "He has the combination of tools that would make him a prospect if he were a couple of years younger: he runs well, has good footwork, good hands, a good arm. He actually has a swing at the plate.

"A couple of these guys, were they a little younger and spent a paltry amount of time really learning the game, would be strong candidates for the GB team." Even so, it was 21-1 to the ballplayers. So much for the pub-table debate. And so much for the glorified rounders theory.